About Last Night - Chapter 9
Catch-up on Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, and Chapter 8.
March, 2018
Linda is a fifty-something woman with short wispy hair, tortoiseshell glasses that make her eyes look small and an aquiline nose. She wears a white shirt, buttoned-up all the way to the top, and I instantly dislike her.
She invites me to sit on an Ikea sofa. I take a deep breath. Live or die, I have to start somewhere, since I can’t do the living or even the dying properly by myself.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she says, and I realise I’m in trouble. Her voice is like honey, and I’m an innocent fly on the sticky edge of a carnivore plant, about to fall into the darkness of my own mind. I run my sweaty palms against my jeans.
‘Are you okay?’ she says, offering me a glass of water.
‘Define okay,’ I say and take a sip of the water. It’s cold, and it feels good as it makes its way down my throat.
‘On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel right now?’ asks Linda without changing her tone, scribbling into a leather-bound notebook. She sits in the opposite armchair and looks at me with a neutral smile through her tiny eyes.
‘Is one an option?’ I say.
‘It is,’ she says, ‘but hardly realistic.’
She scribbles a bit more, then she shuts the notebook down. ’Are you familiar with my therapy methods?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’d better tell you upfront,’ she says. ‘I am a qualified psychotherapist, but my interests go beyond the traditional methods. I use a lot of alternative techniques that have often been more efficient than classic therapy.’
‘Okay?…’
‘So what I mean is that we will try things that may seem silly to you, and I want to know if you are comfortable with my methods.’
‘What kind of silly things?’ I ask, imagining incense, feathers and spells. Maybe a touch of magic mushrooms.
‘For example, if we are not able to identify the source of your trauma straight off the bat, we need to look for it, do some detective work.’
‘I’m not traumatised,’ I say, lying through my teeth like I have been all my life.
‘Trauma gets stored in the body,’ she continues unperturbed. ‘We need to identify the part of the body where it lives and force it to come out, so we can deal with it. Sometimes you can find it with massage or acupuncture. Sometimes with hypnosis. Sometimes with dancing. Sometimes with tapping.’
‘I’ve never much liked Fred Astaire.’
‘How old are you, Helena?’ she says, ignoring my crappy joke.
‘Thirty-seven,’ I say with caution.
‘And are you where you thought you would be in life at thirty-seven?’ she continues in a tone that makes further mocking difficult.
I don’t have to think about this to answer truthfully. ‘I’ve never had a long-term plan. I kind of just plan on making through most days.’
Linda reopens her notebook and starts scribbling again. Her glasses slide down the bridge of her nose, and she pushes them back with a French-manicured hand. I can just picture her at home. She has a beautiful home, in a posh Victorian or Edwardian terraced house, somewhere in Richmond or Highgate. She and her husband have recently added an extension to the already gargantuan house. Her husband is an attorney and makes a ton of money, but he also comes from money. The house was a wedding present gift from his parents. They don’t have any children. Their kitchen is huge (even more so, thanks to the extension), with big French doors and bespoke kitchen cabinets. They own a lot of thriving house plants. They have a gardener. Maybe not a gardener, that would be too much. Linda likes to garden herself and she wears Cath Kidson gloves so she doesn’t mess up her French manicure.
‘Do you want marriage? Children?’ Linda says, interrupting me from the pleasant exercise of making up her life.
‘God, no,’ I blurt.
She stares at me. ‘Why not?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t like to get emotionally attached.’
‘Why is that?’ she asks as she goes back to scribbling.
There is an answer to that question I have not yet managed to put into words. I take myself by surprise by articulating it.
‘Because I hurt them.’
‘Do you want to hurt them?’ she ping-pongs right back.
What kind of question is that? Surely shrinks are supposed to be more subtle than this. That’s it, Linda. I’m going to redecorate your house and it’s going to be ugly.
‘Sometimes,’ I respond.
‘Why?’ insists Linda, going for the jugular.
‘Because…’ I see Ma’s face clearly in my mind’s eye. Her scrunched forehead, pleading with me to let her help me. I see Amy’s tears as I throw all the books she ever gave me into the street, screaming I never wanted to see her again. I begin to cry. I don’t want to but I can’t stop it. Tears are pouring out of me like from a broken faucet.
Linda walks over to my side and puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m going to hug you now,’ she says.
I raise my gaze to her, a puzzled look etched on my face. I’m so surprised by her methods, I stop mid-sob. ‘Are you allowed to do that?’
‘I’m allowed to do whatever I think is right for my patients. And a hug is what you need right now,’ she says and, taking my question as permission, offers up her bony arms.
I bury my face in her shoulder and leave last night’s mascara traces on her white crisp shirt. I want to tell her about Ma. About how I broke her heart when I came back dismantled and put back together in a hurry, after that night in the woods. I want to tell her that, from that moment on, my life has been nothing but a string of bad decisions; so bad, I don’t even know what a good decision looks like anymore. I want to tell her everything, but I’m lost for words. And whenever I’m lost for words, I run. Usually towards something numbing or self-destructive, and away from those who try to help me. Even now, I feel the pull to leave this room and to pretend that it never happened. That I was never here, on this couch, crying in the arms of a woman whose time I’m paying for. To pretend that I have not asked for help. That I don’t need any help. But I don’t move and, instead of running away, or numbing myself, or picking a fight, for the first time in two decades, I sit there, breathing through the pain that’s pulling my chest apart, in the arms of a woman with a beautiful terraced house in Richmond or Highgate.
Do you enjoy reading Helena’s story? Are you curious about what happens to her next? Or about what happened to her in the past? Stay tuned for next week’s installment.
